FREEZE BY CONSUMER AGENCY KEEPS GAS PRICES LOWER FOR ISLAND'S DRIVERS

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- There's nothing more frustrating than trying to figure out gasoline prices.

Unrest in the Middle East, and prices go up. Oil refinery closes for repairs, and prices go up. An OPEC oil minister wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, and you can bet prices at the pumps will increase a short time later.

But that's not always the case in Puerto Rico, where gasoline prices at the pump tend to be slightly lower than on the U.S. mainland. The price of gas here has been stable for three weeks. How about on your block?

The island's Consumer Affairs Department froze prices to distributors and to retailers last month for 30 days, just a day or so after noticing prices jumped 3 cents at the pumps.

Now that's consumer advocacy, yes?

The price of gasoline on the mainland is, on average, about $1.72 per gallon. (In California the average price per gallon is $2.10.) The national average price would equal 45.3 cents per liter, the unit of measurement used here.

In Puerto Rico, it's 43 cents per liter, or $1.63 per gallon.

Most motorists don't care about what causes the price to fluctuate so much. They just want a stable price -- in good times and in bad.

If temporarily capping gasoline prices was done in Florida, or some other state, there would no doubt be a flood of threats from oil companies suggesting the measures hamper new investments in oil exploration or threaten the livelihood of retailers.

How come there are no oil companies threatening lower supplies in Puerto Rico? No closing of gasoline stations? Or, worse yet, no word of any oil companies going under?

Puerto Rico isn't exactly a tiny island. There are 3.8 million people here, and it's one of the worst places in the hemisphere for traffic jams. The consumer-affairs agency froze prices last year during the war in Iraq, and there appears to be no lasting effects.

But this is an island known for consumer service. For instance, the city of San Juan will pay for a stomach-reduction surgery of those who are so heavy, excessive weight threatens their health. The surgery isn't cheap; it's totally free. In one of the few measures of its kind, there's even a kind of customer service -- in a manner of speaking -- for criminals that makes it illegal to keep someone incarcerated without giving them opportunity to post bond.

On the mainland, setting gasoline prices on the street follows this rough guideline: Gas stations sell fuel at a price that enables them to purchase the next batch, plus a little profit. There's no telling how much the next batch is going to cost, so that's what makes setting the price at the local level such a crap shoot.

Unless, that is, some stations decide not to lower prices even though the price of a barrel of oil slides, enabling refineries to put cheaper gasoline into the market.

Those same principles apply here as well. But the consumer protection kicks in when pump prices spike.

So what's to stop stations in Florida or elsewhere from doing the same thing? Anti-trust laws? Fear this might set a dangerous precedent, angering petroleum-company stock holders? Who knows?

Javier Echevarria, the Puerto Rico agency's director, says he's not worried about lawsuits. The ability to freeze gas prices was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1988, the agency says.

We'll see in the following weeks whether the price freeze had much impact at the retail level.

What has been nice, however, is being able to pull into service stations without seeing gas prices change dramatically from one day to the other.